.png)
Ben Ray
back
next
the poet
Poet, reviewer and workshopper Ben Ray is a patron of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and a winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize. His most recent collection is The Kindness of the Eel, and his writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including Poetry Wales and The Oxford Review of Books.
the poems
Epska pjesma for
a new millennium
You wanted to be an epic poem in the drafting
to sit with Marko, Branković, Crnojević
but our palimpsest homeland had forgotten poetry
gifting us only hoarse voices, bloody footprints.
We stayed at your house, frustrated we could not make history:
but you had inherited from a vanished world
distant stories, new borders that tightened round the neck
and a rusted can of tear gas from some atrocity.
Like good citizens we shut the doors, pierced the cap
and inflicted our country upon ourselves
pushing / staring / turning / running / choking / children
vaulting over chintz sofas in desperation
then outside, gasping laughing – you tore your chest open
found three hearts: around the third, the snake was still sleeping
In October 2000 huge protests broke out in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, against the perceived authoritarianism of the Serbian government, resulting in the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević. The protests saw a high level of youth engagement.
Sinning with Captain Birdseye
It really wasn’t necessary. They were just
two fish fingers left sulking
in soggy packaging. But that was the point.
An act of Antoinette extravagance,
a hubristic vote of confidence
in modern society. Was there ever
a better expression of disaster capitalism
than turning on a whole fridge freezer
just for them? No shame: only God can judge
their private fishy palace for two, heated
with North Sea oil to help them feel at home
(Even Anthropocene bad boys have a heart).
Then, of course, the breathless question
on the crowd’s lips: to eat one and leave the other
alone in that icy void? The act of a maniac
the act of a daredevil.
But look at them now. So settled. So happy.
Do you not believe in redemption?
Joke’s on you
I have a tiramisu in my chest freezer
I am a market square
after everyone has left
I am a market square after everyone has left
all made of loose veg and plastic wrapping,
that pervasive pioneer of untouched spaces.
My breath invigorates paper bags across slabs
rustles drain-locked receipts into chorus:
I am the one who pulls up the cobbles to trip the cyclists.
The heart of a lettuce has never looked so lonely
nor the leaves of an artichoke so fragile
than when I wear them, dressing down
in casual wear that would melt your heart.
If carrots had eyes, they would be Disney-round and doleful
as they roll down the orphanages of roadsides
fulfilling tragic character arcs as they’re pulped underfoot.
I am a market square after everyone has left
grand words like desolation and loss are too big
for my ordinary leftover onion-skin self,
this paper-bag floor-level life – where dashed
organic-grown hopes are swept up by street cleaners
and next Sunday always seems so far away
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb
S h a r e